Every year hundreds of thousands of the one million agricultural workers leave farms for higher-paying year round jobs. Due to current immigration law restrictions it is comparatively expensive to use the H-2A visa which permits growers to bring workers into the US on a temporary basis.
Recent efforts to reform immigration laws could be motivated by economic factors rather than an humanitarian cause.
Ever since the movie about an America without Mexicans it has become a fact of life that many businesses could not survive without Mexican immigrant labor both legal and illegal. This is especially true in the agricultural field where about half of all field workers in the US are illegal immigrants. Many farmers assert that as many as eighty percent of their workers are undocumented. They say that even with all the current unemployment native born Americans refuse to apply for the physically demanding work. Every year the market for undocumented farm labor tightens.
Every year hundreds of thousands of the one million agricultural workers leave farms for higher-paying year round jobs. Due to current immigration law restrictions it is comparatively expensive to use the H-2A visa which permits growers to bring workers into the US on a temporary basis. Growers have to pay higher wage and housing costs. According to the USDA crop workers earn an average of $10.76 an hour versus $9.40 in 2007. Many argue that workers should be replaced by machines to end the immigration dilemma. They are faced with the problem of the human factor. A California berry grower points out that machines can’t account for the conditions such as picking berries which ripen at different rates «You can’t get a machine to pick one strawberry and not the one next to it,» explains the grower.
An article from the Washington Post goes even further, indicating that a broad immigration reform will not improve the lack of agricultural labor, since growing Mexican economy is persuading farm workers to stay home instead of crossing an extremely dangerous Northern border, according to a study by UC Davis. ”By the mid-twentieth century, Americans stopped doing farm work. And we were only able to avoid a farm-labor crisis by bringing in workers from a nearby country that was at an earlier stage of development. Now that era is coming to an end,» says Edward Taylor, one of the authors of the study.
Steve Chain / «Entre Noticias» Editorial Team
Image credit: fairimmigration.org
